[onlooker]

C8, your way of thinking is what leads to problems in mental health, you are ill-equipped to deal with reality as per your original post. I will briefly respond to your anti-doomer stance. I do not know on what planet you are on, but if you do not see peak oil coming or having arrived than you are blind. The military intervention by US in the middle east is, has been and continues to be oil-related. You are fooled by the current price of oil. Just because right now we have this glut of unconventional oil. In fact this fits in nicely with your overall theme of it is NOT so bad right now. Many Cassandras of warned us and so we at present are perched on the border of the chasm. Just because you in your ignorance cannot see that does not change the nature of this moment in time. Minerals are finite, bees continue to die, Hurricane Hihyan/Yolanda which hit Philippines was the strongest hurricane on record, thousands upon thousands have been dying from what now appears to be the beginning of real intensification of weather events. North Pole? The Arctic sea ice continues it's inexorable melting. I for one will not be replying anymore to this bait you put out. Your argument amounts to because Armageddon end of the world things are not happening right now, then doomers are foolish. We say you and your ilk are the foolish ones for not anticipating and appreciating the "Storm" coming our way.

[Cog]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'T')he shale revolution is done. We haven't reversed our 1970 peak. TOD never posted monthly charts.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')oesn't mean at some point in the future that there won't be some sort of peak production in the global sense of the word.

[onlooker]

I took the liberty anti-doomers to link this site which shows a continuous diary of disasters and corresponding death toll. By the way doom is not just about GW other sources of doom now days. https://feww.wordpress.com/2011-disaster-calendar/

[ralfy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('C8', 'F')WIW- I am simply stating thast there are all kinds of trends going on in the world- some positive, some negative- but things can change very fast and new technology can become a game changer (see the history of Peak Oil). When we become a "doomer" or "corny" we close our eyes to news that doesn't fit our narrative. I try to post stuff from both sides.

Here is an example that I doubt most of the GW concerned folks would post: There has been a recent study that shows the world is actually getting greener and more area is becoming covered with biomass- especially in the crucial boreal forest area. This seems to be due to two forces: 1. govt.planting programs and 2. urbanization increases- which are removing people from countrysides and allowing plants to grow more thickly.

The bias that many have is to look at a localized area that is deforesting and amplify its disaster while ignoring the overall positive world trend.

Here is the link and the story:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-de ... e26147272/

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Green surprise: Why the world's forests are growing back

If the air feels just a bit fresher, it may be because the trees are making a comeback. Despite a lot of bad news on climate, our planet has become measurably greener, as seen from space. And that points to a way out of the climate crisis.

A group of scholars at Australian, Chinese, Dutch and Saudi Arabian universities recently published, in the journal Nature Climate Change, a 20-year study measuring the precise quantity of the Earth’s “terrestrial biomass” – that is, the total mass of living organisms, most of which are plants. They used two decades of microwave satellite readings (which are an accurate way to measure biological material) to determine how the world’s stock of living things has changed over time.

Because biological matter absorbs and stores carbon, it is crucial to protecting the Earth from climate change: If we diminish the amount of plant matter, then more carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, ends up in the atmosphere.

What the study found was, in the initial years, predictably depressing: Between 1993 and 2002, the world’s stock of plants declined – in large part because of large-scale deforestation in the tropical rain forests of Brazil and Indonesia.

But then, between 2003 and 2012 (the last year they analyzed), something surprising happened: The trees started growing back. Their results showed that deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia slowed sharply, while better growing conditions in the savannahs of northern Australia and southern Africa added mass, and – most dramatically – the vast forests of China and Russia grew back at a considerable pace. The last point is especially significant: The boreal forest, which stretches across Northern Canada and Russia, stores almost 60 per cent of the world’s carbon (tropical rain forests store about half that much).

The result was, they reported, “an overall gain” in the world’s carbon-absorbing green matter – a result that has been reproduced in other recent studies showing an expansion of the global carbon sink. Another study, published in July, found that the share of carbon emissions caused by deforestation has declined by a third in the past decade.

What is most significant is not that the world’s forests are growing back, but the reasons why. Almost all of the regreening of the post-2003 years was caused, whether through explicit policy or happy accident, by countries increasing their level of urbanization, their proportion of commercial agriculture or their rate of economic growth – all of which created the conditions for a more carbon-friendly ecology.

A lot of the regreening was caused by explicit policies devoted to that task: Starting in the 1990s, both China and the European Union introduced “afforestation” programs to return former croplands to forest – in the case of Europe, which produces far more food than it needs, by paying farmers grants to convert fields to forests – in the process converting at least 6,000 square kilometres of land back to forest.

China’s program, popularly known as the “Great Green Wall,” is intended to replant almost 400 million hectares of forest in a 4,500-kilometre strip across northern China by 2050, making it the world’s largest reforesting program, and it appears to have had dramatic results.

This was only possible because China shifted from being a deeply impoverished, rural economy based on small-hold peasant farming (which tends to denude the land of forests, as well as producing very little food) to one that is urbanized and based on higher-production agriculture – so it both no longer needs all that former forest land, and also has the financial and infrastructural resources to replant forests.

Brazil, likewise, now has the scale of economy and government to end the ruin of the Amazon forest – and, for the past decade, the political will. That ruin was largely based on wasteful large-scale methods of soy and cattle farming that chewed rapidly into virgin forest. Starting in 2004, Brazil launched a Program for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon that, in the words of Jonah Busch from the Center for Global Development, has included satellite monitoring, law enforcement, new protected areas and indigenous territories, restrictions on rural credit, and moratoriums on unsustainable soy and cattle production. This has caused Amazon deforestation to fall by almost 80 per cent – but has actually increased Brazil’s soy and cattle production, because farms were forced to find commercial-agriculture efficiencies rather than simply eating up more land.

Brazil is one of several ex-developing countries that now have the resources and urbanization level to get their forests under control – but even Brazil is getting help from Germany in a program, announced this week, in which Berlin will finance a program, initially costing $830-million, to reduce Amazon deforestation to zero by 2030 – something ecologists say is easily possible.

That’s modelled on a deal struck between Norway and Indonesia in 2010 in which the Scandinavian country is paying to stop the wasteful cutting of Indonesia’s rain forests – a program which, in combination with modernization of Indonesia’s economy, is bearing fruit, according to the satellite measures.

The return of the trees teaches us a lesson. To reduce our destructive carbon output, the solution is not to reduce economic activity; rather, it’s to combine a booming urban economy with smart policies that make growth and ecology work in harmony.

[ralfy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ralfy', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '
')So the classic example, to me, is the "financial doomerist" meme that any positive economic numbers, such as ongoing global economic growth is a lie, since everything the MSM prints is a lie cloaked in a conspiracy.

[ralfy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'D')id anyone really predict the increase in oil production in the USA due to fracking? Over at TOD, when they were still alive, there were scary charts posted every month showing a shark fin drop-off in global oil production and it was not even theorized that the US could reverse its 1970 peak. Those scary charts were absolutely wrong.

Yes oil production predictions will always be wrong because there is too much complexity in the system as pstarr rightly points out. Doesn't mean at some point in the future that there won't be some sort of peak production in the global sense of the word. Unless you believe in abiotic oil, there will be a time when we simply can't find or produce any additional amount each year. Oil fields deplete over time and a collection of oil fields will deplete over time. But when that is, no one is going to be able to predict.

[ralfy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'T')he shale revolution is done. We haven't reversed our 1970 peak. TOD never posted monthly charts.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')oesn't mean at some point in the future that there won't be some sort of peak production in the global sense of the word.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death..."- Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb Published in 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb sold more than 3 million copies. The book turned this Stanford professor into his generation’s academic rock star. Ehrlich became the only author Johnny Carson interviewed for an entire hour on The Tonight Show. In 1990, he won The Crafoord Prize - ecologists’ version of the Nobel Prize. I have an unusual personal connection with Ehrlich's book. Back in the 1970s, each classroom of my Pittsburgh public grade school had dozens of copies of The Population Bomb lining its bookshelves. I don’t recall ever actually studying The Population Bomb. But it’s clear that Pittsburgh Public Schools thought they might need

[onlooker]

Ehrlich didn't "fail', he was premature in his prediction. The environmental situation has only worsened, resources are being depleted ever more, the viability of life support systems are being compromised. We have employed all our ingenuity and technology to allow our overshoot of carrying capacity to continue but our huge population is degrading and depleting the environmental basis for their survival each day

[Cog]

If doom is so certain, then you should have no problem assigning a correct date to it.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'E')hrlich didn't "fail', he was premature in his prediction.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'E')hrlich didn't "fail', he was premature in his prediction.

[onlooker]

I notice that you all, like so much to critique abstractly non identified doom predictions based on timelines. Yet, none of you respond directly to the reasoning behind calling for "doom". You have no credible rebuttal to the brewing storm of a huge human population depleting down its non renewable resources and overtaxing renewables ones. Nor to the terrible stresses we are inflicting on the web of life and functionality of ecosystems. I understand none of you are Earth Scientists or Biologists or even Climate scientists but geez at some point one would think that you would feel obliged to render some sort of reply to myriad of developing environmental catastrophes. I guess not. I am not sure why I even bother anymore.